One of the most surprising things about Youghal, to me anyway, was that Sir Walter Raleigh used to live there. His house, Myrtle Grove, still stands and has even been converted into an addiction rehabilitation center. It’s also supposed to be the place where a servant threw a bucket of water over Raleigh’s head after seeing puffs of smoke coming up from his chair, not realizing that smoke was coming out of a tobacco pipe and maybe not even knowing what a tobacco pipe was. But what was Raleigh doing in Ireland in the first place? The answer requires a little bit of Irish history.
Ireland Before 1534
From Henry II’s invasion of Ireland back in the 1200s up the reign of Henry VIII in the 1500s, the Irish had pretty much managed to keep to themselves. The English had their HQ in the Pale—a strip of land on Ireland’s east coast with Dublin at its center—which, being English, they considered the civilized part of Ireland. ‘Beyond the pale’ indicated barbarian country, inhabited by Gaelic-speaking people with their own language, laws, customs and private conflicts. By extension, it also applied to those Anglo-Norman lords who’d been gifted land back in the 12th century and who’d more or less assimilated with the Irish. The one ‘global’ institution that managed to infiltrate Gaelic-speaking Ireland with some success was the Catholic Church, particularly the Augustinians.
Henry VIII (1509-1547) and the English Reformation
In 1517 Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses kick-started a Protestant revolution. Although Henry VIII initially defended the Church against the ‘Little Monk,’ he made his own break from the Pope in 1533 by secretly marrying Anne Boleyn. The Pope excommunicated him and Henry declared himself Head of the Church of England. So the English Reformation was begun. Inevitably, Ireland was going to be dragged along with it.
For many years, the English Crown had effectively deputized control of Ireland to the Fitzgeralds of Kildare. From Henry’s pov this was a regrettable situation. For one thing, the Fitzgeralds were devout Catholics. In 1534, soon after Henry VIII had declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, he summoned Gerald Fitzgerald the 9th Earl of Kildare to England for a little stay in the Tower of London. A few months later rumors of Gerald’s death floated over the Irish Sea and his son Thomas Fitzgerald furiously marched on Dublin and renounced allegiance to Henry VIII. This became known as the Kildare Rebellion (1534-35) and though it was crushed, it signalled the shape of things to come.
Even at this point Cromwell saw Ireland as a quagmire, as shown by recent biography of Henry’s handler, Thomas Cromwell: A Life: A definitive guide to an extraordinary journey (irishtimes.com) (2018) by Diarmaid MacCullough:
“A persistent thorn was “the graveyard of English statesmanship”, and MacCulloch notes that Tudor governance in Ireland generally displayed “all the finesse of knitting in boxing gloves”. In 1535 Cromwell penned a memo on the island asking “whether it shall be expedient to begin a conquest or a reformation?”. With Anglo-Irish and Gaelic lords alike persistently “papalist” and rebellious, English money and men were “haplessly sucked into the Irish morass”. Cromwell saw full English rule as the solution, and he set the scene for Henry to be crowned King of Ireland with an enhanced parliament in Dublin.”
In 1542 the Kingdom of Ireland officially came into being, though it was not recognized by any Catholic country.
Mary I (reigned 1553-1558)
Mary, aka Bloody Mary, married Philip of Spain, who persuaded the English Parliament to repeal Henry’s religious laws and to reestablish ties with Rome. Mary reinstated heresy laws and proceeded to enforce the Marian persecutions, in which unrepentant Protestants were burnt at the stake. At least 300 people died in excruciating pain. Despite her Catholic sympathies, she and Philip continued the Tudor conquest of Ireland, establishing ‘Queen’s County’ and ‘King’s County’ in the midlands. This was the beginning of the Irish Plantations, where British or Scottish people were transported to Ireland to live on confiscated land. Since the war of Independence in 1921 they have been called respectively County Laois and County Offaly.
It was during Mary’s reign that there was some disturbance up north. Highland Scots were making settlements along the Antrim coast and the Irish chieftain Shane O’Neil was doing his best to get more land than he already had. In 1557, Thomas Radclyffe the 3rd Earl of Sussex presided over a massacre at Rathlin Island. As recounted in Campaign Journals of the Elizabethan Irish Wars, on September 3, several English captains stormed the Ireland and ‘killed as many as they might come by or get out of caves, both man, woman, child and beasts’.
Essex then proceeded to wreck Ulster more generally:
“Far from being reluctant to employ scorched earth tactics because of the high civilian mortality that it wrought (as has been claimed elsewhere), the government forces resorted to land and crop-burning repeatedly during the mid-Tudor and early Elizabethan years, and did so precisely because it promised to wreak the most havoc, and kill the most people. Once in Ulster’s Gaelic heartland Sussex’s army moved freely about, burning at will. Presumably because he could not linger in the province for as long as he would have liked, the earl prioritised the fastest route to a lasting impact: famine. Hence his ordering the slaughter of 4,000 captured cows in Tír Eoghain. As early as 1558 large parts of the country were destroyed by war, whole areas depopulated. According to Archbishop [George] Dowdall, it was possible to ride 30 miles across much of central and southern Ulster without seeing any sign of life. Famine stalked the province.”
David Edwards, Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, 2010
Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603)
When Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558, she inherited an Occupied Ireland that was none too happy with the trend of events. And thanks to her policies, it was about to get much less happy.
One of the first major Irish wars of her reign was the First Desmond Rebellion. The inciting incident occurred in 1565, 25 kilometers from Youghal, at the Battle of Affane in County Waterford. The Earl of Desmond and the Earl of Ormonde—Munster’s two most prominent Anglo-Irish families–came to blows on the banks of the Blackwater River. The Earl of Desmond was the head of the Fitzmaurice/Fitzgerald dynasty; the Old English Butlers of Ormonde were very close to the royals. James Butler, the 9th Earl of Ormonde, for example, had held many important offices under Henry VIII and was a relative of Anne of Boleyn. The cause of the quarrel was the continual encroachment into their territory by the English government that had begun in the 1530s.
The battle was essentially a private dust-up between two noble houses, and as such it completely enraged Elizabeth I, who saw it as an affront to her authority. The two earls were summoned to London. Ormonde, who was Elizabeth’s cousin, told her that Desmond had started it. Elizabeth promptly imprisoned Desmond and two of his brothers in the Tower of London.
Meanwhile, the Earldom of Desmond was being looked after by a soldier named James Fitzmaurice. A cousin of Gerald, he took advantage of the situation to claim that he, James, should be earl and he set about orchestrating a rebellion. With 4,500 men he attacked and besieged Kerrycurihy and then Cork. This was later known as the First Desmond Rebellion (1569-1573).
At this time, Henry Sidney was Lord Deputy of Ireland. He’d been with Essex on the Ulster campaign and had learned from the experience. Sidney & friends used scorched earth tactics to devastate the lands belonging to Fitzmaurice’s allies. The English Commander Humphrey Gilbert even resorted to decorating roadsides with civilian heads:
“The heads of all those (of what sort soever they were) which were killed in the day, should be cut off from their bodies and brought to the place where he encamped at night, and should there be laid on the ground by each side of the way leading into his own tent so that none could come into his tent for any cause but commonly he must pass through a lane of heads which he used ad terrorem…[It brought] great terror to the people when they saw the heads of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk, and friends.
Ireland in the Virginian Sea, Colonialism in the British Atlantic by Audrey Horning p. 73
The rebellion was eventually put down and Fitzgerald went into exile in Europe. The new Lord Deputy of Ireland Sir John Perrot executed hundreds of the rebels and declared a ban on Gaelic speaking, Brehon laws, Irish dress, bards and the maintenance of private armies. The destruction of land in Munster led to severe famine and plague.
Up north, Elizabeth decided to accelerate her plantations, importing Protestant civilians by the boatload. Not only that, but she cooked up a scheme nicknamed the Enterprise of Ulster. This was the procedure of stealing huge tracts of land and granting it to Englishmen. This plan was discovered by the Irish and it did not go over particularly well.
One of the chief protestors against the Enterprise of Ulster was Sorley Boy MacDonnell, who fought hard to frustrate the scheme. Essex defeated him at Castle Toome but Sorley Boy would not stay defeated. He retreated to Carrickfergus to resupply and regroup. On July 26 1575, Lord Deputy of Ireland Sir Henry Sidney and the Earl of Essex, ordered an attack on a sanctuary on Rathlin Island. This was where Sorley Boy had sent refugees and treasure to keep them safe from harm during the conflict. Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norreys sailed over, defeated the 200 armed defenders and then proceeded to massacre more than 400 civilians in the caves– children, women, sick, elderly. In a letter to Elizabeth’s secretary and spymaster Francis Walsingham, Essex wrote gleefully that Sorley Boy MacDonnell witnessed the massacre from the mainland and was ‘like to run mad with sorrow.’ David Edwards, author of Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (2010) observes:
“One of the grimmer aspects of government activity during this period was the formal extension of military severity over large sections of the ordinary populace. Threatening the peasantry was a guaranteed way to sever the ties binding the broad mass of ordinary people to their traditional local rulers. In the course of the crown campaigns the killing of the low-born became widespread. It was even considered unremarkable. Returning from one of his outings Lord Deputy Sidney joked in a letter to Whitehall that he had killed so many Irish ‘varlets’, he had lost count.”
Over on the continent, James Fitzmaurice spent his time in Europe trying to gather support for a second rebellion. He spoke to several nobles including the Governor of Brittany, Catherine de Medici, King Philip II, Don John and Pope Gregory XIII. The latter underwrote the cost of troops to invade Ireland, many of whom seem to have been desperadoes that the Pope wanted to get rid of.
The second Desmond Rebellion kicked off on July 16, 1579, when Fitzmaurice & Co. arrived in Dingle. On the 18th, they anchored ship near Smerwick (now Ard na Caithne), and the war was on.
In August 1580, the Irish rebels ambushed and massacred an English force led by Lord Deputy of Ireland Grey de Wilton at the Battle of Glenmalure, an Irish victory still commemorated in the folk song “Follow Me Up to Carlow.”
The following month, a Papal force of about 700 just landed at Smerwick. Grey de Wilton raced over with 4,000 troops and captured the lot. The Papal commander Sebastiano Di San Giuseppe sought terms, but terms were not forthcoming:
“It is a matter of conjecture as to whether Grey had offered clemency or not, many say that he did and then betrayed his promise, but what is clear is that the entire Papal force, foreign and Irish, men and women, were slaughtered and beheaded. Their heads were thrown into a field now known as Gort na gCinn and the bodies were tossed into the sea.
“One of those charged to commit the executions was Sir Walter Raleigh, who like Grey was a survivor of the rout at Glenmalure. Raleigh had also participated in a massacre of MacDonnells on Rathlin Island a few years earlier. It is interesting to note that when he fell foul of King James I one of the charges brought against him was that of the killings at Smerwick.”
Siege of Smerwick in 1580 – 16th Century History of Ireland (yourirish.com)
Walter Raleigh
So where Walter Raleigh comes in is mainly in butchering the Irish. Soon after this campaign, he went over to London to take part in court life and to become a favourite of the queen.
In return for military service, he was rewarded with 12,000 acres in the counties of Cork, Tipperary and Waterford and he set up shop as an Irish landlord. His holdings included the walled town of Youghal. The truth is, he didn’t hold onto these properties very long because they weren’t making money for him. For some reason, he had trouble getting Irish tenants to work on his land, and he was also an extravagant spender. By 1609, he’d sold the lot to Richard Boyle.
Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney was an English poet, courtier, scholar and soldier best remembered for Astrophel and Stella and The Defence of Poesy.
Philip Sidney also wrote a treatise called Discourse on Irish Affairs (1577), defending his father’s actions as Lord Deputy of Ireland. While it was two years after Lord Henry Sidney’s hideous attack on the Rathlin Island sanctuary, the criticisms levelled against Henry seemed to have had more to do with taxation policy. Philip presented the treatise to Queen Elizabeth. Fragments of the manuscript are held in the British Museum (Cotton MS., Titus B, xii. pp. 557-559), and an article on Sir Philip Sidney | Poetry Foundation suggests that it is strong stuff:
To the modern reader Sidney’s reasoning seems shockingly brutal, yet the repression he advocates is typical of English attitudes toward the Irish during Elizabeth’s reign.
As a result of his father’s work, Philip Sidney enjoyed life on confiscated Munster land. One of these properties included Kilcolman Castle in the wilds near Buttevant. Philip Sidney lived here for a while but soon passed it on to his friend and fellow poet Edmund Spenser.
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser, in fact, wrote The Fairie Queene in that castle. And he sailed over to England in the company of Walter Raleigh to present it to Queen Elizabeth. In 1598 he was back in the castle but had to vacate it in a hurry when it was attacked by a force led by Hugh O’Neil, Earl of Tyrone.
Possibly miffed by this dispossession, he wrote “A Vewe of the Present State of Irlande: A Prose Treatise on the Reformation of Ireland” and published it shortly afterwards. It advocated teaching the Irish a lesson by burning their land and starving them to all death. Look how well it worked last time, he argues, with a description of the aftermath of the Second Desmond Rebellion:
“‘Out of everye corner of the woode and glenns they came creepinge forth upon theire handes, for theire legges could not beare them; they looked Anatomies [of] death, they spake like ghostes, crying out of theire graves; they did eate of the carrions, happye wheare they could find them, yea, and one another soone after, in soe much as the verye carcasses they spared not to scrape out of theire graves; and if they found a plott of water-cresses or shamrockes, theyr they flocked as to a feast… in a shorte space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentyfull countrye suddenly lefte voyde of man or beast: yett sure in all that warr, there perished not manye by the sworde, but all by the extreamytie of famine … they themselves had wrought.’
John Donne
Sick Ireland is with a strange war possessed
Like to an ague, now raging, now at rest,
Which time will cure, yet it must do her good
If she were purged, and her head-vein let blood.
“Elegy XX (Alternative) Love’s War”
William Shakespeare
As James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare and 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber & Faber), points out, William Shakespeare’s time with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men coincided exactly with the Nine Years War or Tyrone’s Rebellion–1593-1603, Elizabeth’s long farewell party:
“Shakespeare’s most sustained interest in Ireland and Irishness dovetails with this huge spike in the conscription of soldiers for the Irish wars. As Neil Younger has shown in his excellent study from 2012,War and Politics in the Elizabethan Counties, more than 44,000 men were packed off from England’s villages, town and metropolis between 1590 and 1602. This is a staggering number from a population of four million, the equivalent of about 500,000 soldiers today.
“Put another way, one out of every 100 English people, or roughly one out of every 50 English men, and an even higher percentage of those in their 20s and 30s – the generation of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Donne – were packed off to Ireland in the late 1590s.
“Dig a bit deeper into those numbers and you can easily see why the Irish campaign haunts the Henry IV and Henry V plays, on stage and in print, for while about 2,500 men were shipped off to Ireland in 1596 and 1597, that number would rise dramatically. About 8,000 men were conscripted for the Irish wars in 1598, 1599, 1600 and 1601. In those four years alone twice as many men were conscripted for Ireland than all the men sent to fight in the Netherlands going back to 1585.”
‘What ish my nation?’ Shakespeare’s Irish connections (irishtimes.com)
